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Linux Of the Future May Be About Which Environment, Not Which Distribution
itwbennett writes "In its 2012 roadmap, the Mozilla Foundation highlights plans to create its own soup-to-nuts mobile platform, known as Boot to Gecko. With this move, the Mozilla Foundation 'is finally shaking off its dependence on browser revenues and treading where Google, with ChromeOS; Canonical, with Unity on Ubuntu; and (most recently) the Plasma community's Spark tablet have already started: the creation of standards-based platforms that rely on robust web applications (in varying degrees) more than native-run apps to provide the user experience,' writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'I very much think that we are heading for a time when Linux flavors will be identified by environments, not distributions.'"
With Google making up about 90% of the Mozilla revenues these days, I've been worried for a while that they were going to kill off Firefox in the face of Chrome. Nothing against Chrome, but the add-on community for Firefox is by far the best. And it's particularly robust when it comes to add-ons for script-blocking, downloading videos from Youtube, etc. (all of which Google has a vested interest in stopping or trying to suppress in Chrome). Giving up Firefox means going back to an era where only the big corps control the browsers. And I don't like the thought of Google killing off Adblock and other extensions the second there is no alternative (except Opera I guess).
So here's to hoping that this move isn't a foreshadowing of a time when Mozilla does everything BUT Firefox.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... stop telling me how I should run my computer by trying to lock me in to their "vision."
The "vision thing" didn't work out in the dot-com bust, and it's not working out for Unity, or Chromebooks, or anything else. When it gets to the point that Apple and Microsoft are starting to look more open, "Open Source" has a problem.
It's the applications, people! Until linux can run most of them, it's going to remain mostly a server and utility OS, because most people have at least one "must have" application that won't let them switch.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Is the desktop still gonna suck?
Nope, not this year. If you hadn't heard, 2012 is going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
Relevant video: link